2 ms·
If primes derived from pi are not suspect, then that surely goes for primes derived from 1/pi, e, sqrt(2)... as well? If someone uses 1/pi, the first question
by cperciva 11y ago
If primes derived from pi are not suspect, then that surely goes for primes derived from 1/pi, e, sqrt(2)... as well?
If someone uses 1/pi, the first question they face is going to be "why not pi". If you need a series of values, sqrt(p) is reasonable, but if you're just looking for one value then using sqrt(17) is going to look suspicious.
What about bit order, byte order?
What about them? Primes don't have bit or byte orderings. They're just integers.
If you say "I generated this prime by taking Pi, writing it as a series of bytes, permuting those bytes, and then interpreting those as an integer", people will be very suspicious.
- fdej 11y agoCheck out the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_up_my_sleeve_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_up_my_sleeve_number for some examples: ARIA uses 1/π (indeed, why not pi?) MD5 uses sin(n) (why not cos(n) or sqrt(n)?) SHA-1 and SHA-2 use square roots and cube roots of small primes (why not sin(n) or pi?) DFC uses e. NewDES uses the United States Declaration of Independence. RC5 uses both e and the golden ratio. BLAKE uses "a table of 16 constant words which are the leading 512 or 1024 bits of the fractional part of π". (Here you see how things like bit or byte order can give you more choices.)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]